How to Improve Your Management Procedures Usability

Are your people consistently following your procedures? Each year, organizations lose thousands of dollars through common mistakes and lapses in usability. But what does that mean for business owners and executives? How do you improve usage of management procedures?

Ask yourself:

Are your required actions described thoroughly and accurately, or are the details left open to interpretation?

Is your content consistent and complete, or are your writers leaving gaps no one has noticed?

Are revisions controlled, or are different people using different versions?

If you’re unsure about any of the answers to these questions, there is good news: you can make your procedures clear and complete without combing through all of them yourself, line by line. You have invested in your procedures; now ensure you are communicating clear expectations, and your professionalism, with the best tools possible.

How to Improve Management Procedures:

To be effective, procedures must be action oriented, grammatically correct, and written in a consistent style and format to ensure usability. These guidelines, along with industry “best practices” that are documented in auditable criteria, can be used :

Context. Actions must properly describe the activity to be performed.

Consistency. All references and terms are used the same way every time, and the procedure must ensure consistent results.

Completeness. There must be no information, logic, or design gaps.

Control. The document and its described actions demonstrate feedback and control.

Compliance. All actions are sufficient for their intended compliance.

Correctness. The document must be grammatically correct without spelling errors.

Clarity. Documents must be easy to read and understandable.

Strengthen Management Procedures’ Documents

With a technical writing review, professional technical writers can review and edit your documents. Methodologies have been developed and used by experienced technical writers to strengthen policies and procedures, so you can put efficiency and expertise to work saving you time and hassle. You can eliminate the costly professional headache of poorly written management procedures.

Case Study: Procedure Mistakes Add Up Quickly

Without knowing it, employees at a local auto parts company were having a costly problem determining when to accept customer credit. The company actually had a detailed credit application procedure, including an exhaustive error correction routine, but the procedure had one fatal flaw: it was not properly indexed.

Without a way to readily locate and reference the applicable procedure in the operations manual, employees could not find it and were simply not using it at all, leading to an inconsistent process and wildly varying output. Potentially valuable customers were regularly turned away by some staff members, while others accepted bad credit risks because they were unsure of which ones to reject.

A small omission like this can add up to thousands of dollars in lost sales and good will. Even the most thorough procedures inevitably have gaps that come from being “too close” to the process or not following the basic rules of effective procedure writing.

Get the Help and Reap the Rewards:

Easy upgrades to your documents

Increased clarity for your written procedures

Expert objective commentary on your documents

Fast results to model other procedures

Convenient tech writers at your service

Detailed grammar and language correction

If your policies and procedures are incomplete, outdated or inconsistent, then you are probably not driving the performance improvement you intended. Likewise, your management procedures are not getting used as much as they should be. But no matter what your worst procedure headache is, you can eliminate your lapses in usability now and improve to “best practices” standards using a procedure review.

2 comments

The problem I would see with the whole area of procedures is that there are so many different aspects to a business and getting employees to fully understand all procedures would be an extremely time consuming process which would result in lost production time. In saying that I can see how putting the effort in at the start would lead to time saving down the line. Its the old conundrum of losing production time now to save it in the long run. I think finding the right balance of learning and educating employees and time spent on production is the key to success